The end of a strange seven-month affair at Rangers as Dave King moves on from Pedro Caixinha

There was, for instance, at least two of the most infamous results in the Ibrox side’s history – the first round Europa League defeat to Progres Niederkorn (aka the fourth best team in Luxembourg), after which he earned extra style points for remonstrating with the travelling supporters from a bush, and the heaviest ever home defeat to their historic rivals Celtic, a 5-1 dismantling last April.

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So there was little surprise then when an impromptu board meeting was convened yesterday morning and it was decided that he should make a rare exit from the club’s Auchenhowie training ground to be given his marching orders by chairman Dave King. Because chaos and trouble seemed to follow Caixinha around during his time at Rangers, none more so than a bruising BetFred Cup semi-final defeat to Motherwell only last Saturday.

His fate may have been sealed there and then, but any hopes of a stay of execution dissipated in the kind of riotous injury time period against Kilmarnock which pretty much summed up his time in Scotland. As he arrived in the dressing room post-match, he is understood to have been met with a fairly sarcastic response from his players.

There were quizzical looks all round when Caixinha arrived in Scottish football, the end result of a rather hurried and perplexing recruitment process by a three-man panel comprising Graeme Park, Andrew Dickson and Stewart Robertson which was originally also to include the appointment of a director of football, although the two appointments essentially would be made separately. Actually paying money to take Caixinha out of his contract early, the idea of waiting around for the summer for Derek McInnes was apparently dismissed, as was Gary Rowett, now re-inventing himself with Derby.

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As for the director of football, after Southampton’s Ross Wilson prevaricated and then ultimately rejected the post, one silver lining under a fairly massive cloud is the fact that Mark Allen, finally recruited from Manchester City as director of football, should at least be able to help the board out when it comes to appointing Caixinha’s successor.

It isn’t being smart after the fact to point out that there was little in Caixinha’s resume to suggest he would be the man to lead Rangers back to glory. Given consideration as an assistant manager to Vitor Pereira previously, Caixinha was working in Qatar with Al-Gharafa, having had modest success in Mexican football. He was a no-nonsense disciplinarian, something which obviously played well at his interview. But his determination to do things his way often meant ignoring a little bit of canny local advice. By the end there would be differences of opinion even with people such as Pedro Mendes, part of the entourage when he arrived.

This bloody-mindedness was as much his undoing as anything. As engaging as his media appearances were, folksy Portuguese sayings about caravans and barking dogs, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and vampires, only invited ridicule. His determination to ostracise and criticise out-of-favour players such as Michael O’Halloran by forcing them to train before sunrise backfired when they started banging them in on-loan or at their new clubs. Fans could tell with their own eyes that spending £3.5m and big wages for players such as Eduardo Herrera and Carlos Pena was a luxury they could ill afford.

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That combative nature also backfired when it came to matchdays. It is easy to forget that Rangers went in at half-time in the only Old Firm match of this season at nil-nil, having just spurned a fine opportunity. At a time when he had spoken pre-match of the need for calm in the maelstrom, his contribution was to charge onto the park, jab a finger in the face of Scott Brown, accusing him of elbowing Alfredo Morelos, and say it wouldn’t have happened if he was around. Any momentum the Ibrox side had dissipated during the break and Celtic ran out comfortable winners.

There were echoes of that again in his very last week. Having vented his spleen and squared up to Stephen Robinson at Hampden – it did nothing to help the Ibrox side win the game – he was suspended from the touchline and powerless as Ryan Jack self-destructed for a third time this season and Kilmarnock put the tin lid on his time with a last minute equaliser.

Successful foreign managers can adapt to situations and find compromise. Instead, like Paul Le Guen before him, Caixinha seemed to dig himself a bigger hole. It was fairly clear in recent weeks the Rangers dressing room was a divisive, unhappy place and instructing the captain and vice captain to stay away from Ibrox this week was a cry for help.

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The whole sorry seven months goes down as a mistake then, and a costly one at that. It is anyone’s guess what the total bill for this piece of boardroom folly will be. When you throw in the backroom staff, and a job lot of players for whom Rangers are likely to make a significant loss on, we could be talking tens of millions.

More money will be required to fund Caixinha’s replacement, certainly if Rangers, as expected, go down the route they should probably have done back in March and make a concerted attempt to persuade Derek McInnes to abandon Aberdeen for his boyhood heroes. He and his assistant Tony Docherty are now under contract until the summer of 2020. First the club must work out if this is correct model they want to follow, but Caixinha once predicted that Aberdeen were reaching ‘the end of their cycle’. In fact, they still comfortably lead Rangers in the Premiership. But it would be another dark irony of the Caixinha affair if a variation of those words eventually persuaded McInnes that the Ibrox hot seat was worth taking on.